Surveillance Backdoors 'Contribute to Insecurity', Report Says

The existing state of affairs in which government agencies and intelligence services work to insert backdoors into various hardware, software and networks is not only a problem in terms of civil rights but also represents a serious security risk to most users and the Internet itself, a recent...

TrueCrypt Audit Team Creates Technical Advisory Board

As the TrueCrypt audit chugs along toward a deterministic, clean build of the open-source encryption software and a palatable license, the organizers have brought prominent security and legal experts aboard as a technical advisory team. The experts will not only provide guidance on the current...

Google engineers over surveillance scandal: 'Fuck you NSA'

On Tuesday, the Washington Post revealed a few more NSA slides released by Edward Snowden, which revealed that the spy agency NSA was infiltrating the private data links between Google and Yahoo data centers as part of a program called MUSCULAR. Chairman and former CEO of Google Eric Schmidt says...

Google engineers over surveillance scandal: 'Fuck you NSA'

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Smartphones, A Perfect Cyber Espionage and Surveillance Weapon

The use of mobile devices in government environments concerns the secret service of any states, cyber espionage more often exploits the mobile platforms. Mobile devices are reason of great concern for governments, they have a great computational capability, huge memories to store our personal dat...

Apple Says It Has 'Never Received an Order Under Section 215'

In a new report detailing the number and kind of requests for user information it’s gotten from various governments, Apple said it has never received a request for information under Section 215 of the USA PATROT Act and would likely fight one if it ever came. The company also disclosed that it ha...

NIST Reviews Crypto Standards Development

The National Institute for Standards and Technology has taken an important step toward repairing what the National Security Agency has allegedly fractured by initiating a review of its cryptographic standards development processes. NIST-sponsored algorithms are at the heart of numerous crypto...

Tech Giants Plead for U.S. Surveillance Reforms

Giant technology companies have been vocal about the need for more transparency with regard to the national security requests for user data they receive. But until now, they’ve stayed out of the political fight to address government surveillance, in particular by the National Security Agency...

'Dark Mail Alliance', Future of surveillance proof email technology

Yesterday I learned about 'Dark Mail Alliance', where Lavabit, reportedly an email provider for NSA leaker Edward Snowden and Silent Circle comes together to create a surveillance-proof email technology. Ladar Levison at Lavabit and Silent Circle CEO Mike Janke, Founders of two e-mail services th...

Lavabit, Silent Circle Form New Anti-Surveillance Dark Mail Alliance

As the stunning revelations about the NSA’s collection methods and capabilities continue to mount, two secure email providers that have shut down their services in recent months have formed a new alliance to develop and deploy a new secure email platform that will be resistant to surveillance and...

Obama Administration to Review NSA Capabilities

President Barack Obama has initiated a review of the procedures and methods that the NSA uses to collect intelligence at home and overseas to ensure that the agency isn’t overstepping its bounds in phone and Internet data collection. The review comes at a time when Congress is set to consider...

New Bill Would End Mass Surveillance

UPDATE: Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner R-Wisc. is introducing a bill that would counteract many of the elements of the U.S. PATRIOT Act that enables the mass collection of data belonging to U.S. citizens. Sensenbrenner’s bill is called the USA FREEDOM Act, a quasi-acronym for Uniting and Strengthening...

TrueCrypt Open Source License Audit Bringing Clarity

The list of objectors to the TrueCrypt open source license is a long one and includes some popular distributions such as Debian, Fedora—and by extension Red Hat. In fact, the wrangling over the TrueCrypt license dates back as far as 2006, long before there were serious inquiries as to the...

EFF: Congress Has Opportunity to Stop Mass Surveillance

Since the leaks of NSA surveillance methods began in June, there has been a flurry of activity in Congress, with members scurrying to line up on either side of the issue, either defending the agency’s methods or condemning them. That mad scramble also has included the introduction of a number of...

Unbreakable Apple's iMessage encryption is vulnerable to eavesdropping attack

Though Apple claims iMessage has end-to-end encryption, But researchers claimed at a security conference that Apple's iMessage system is not protected and the company can easily access it. Cyril Cattiaux - better known as pod2g, who has developed iOS jailbreak software, said that the company's...

TrueCrypt Audit to Answer Backdoor Question

The grassroots movement to audit TrueCrypt, the popular open source encryption tool, is gaining steam with tens of thousands of dollars already raised to fund the effort to not only professionally review the source code behind the tool, but also to legally review the custom license governing its...

Unbreakable Apple's iMessage encryption is vulnerable to eavesdropping attack

Though Apple claims iMessage has end-to-end encryption, But researchers claimed at a security conference that Apple’s iMessage system is not protected and the company can easily access it. Cyril Cattiaux - better known as pod2g, who has developed iOS jailbreak software, said that the company’s...

Lavabit Gives Users Chance to Recover Email Archives

Lavabit, the now-shuttered secure email provider that has become something of a rallying point for privacy advocates and security experts in the ongoing NSA surveillance saga, is giving its former users until Thursday night to change their passwords on the service. They will then have a short...

New Zealand Government Forcing Internet Companies and Network Operators to provide Interception capability

In August the New Zealand has passed a bill that radically expands the powers of The Government Communications Security Bureau GCSB, an intelligence agency of the New Zealand government, equivalent of the National Security Agency NSA. The bill demands the companies and other network operators lik...

Yahoo Turns on SSL by Default for Email Users

Yahoo, one of the last email holdouts to implement SSL by default, announced it will do so in January. The company has been criticized as one of the few remaining giant Internet companies for its delay in turning on encryption by default for its web-based email users. It will now do so on Jan. 8,...